Hacker News Reader

Comment by SxC97 | Hacker News Reader

I used YouTube's "Not Interested" button to filter out political content at the end of 2020 so I haven't noticed that.

But I have noticed over the last week, more 'contrarian' content. I watched a few videos on Elden Ring builds and I kept seeing videos like "The BIGGEST Problem With Elden Ring" or "5 Reasons Why Elden Ring is BROKEN". I saw a few videos on configuring pfSense for my home lab and I started getting videos like "Is pfSense Any Good In 2022" or "Still Using pfSense? Use THIS Instead!"

I know these sound like regular Youtube-y, clickbait-y titles, but just a week or two ago it wasn't this bad.

View on HN

Does that "Not Interested" button do anything? I get continually spammed with recommended Minecraft videos. I've never watched one, have never played the game, and click on "Not Interested" for the suggestions, and still get spammed.

It worked for me. Heres what I did.

1. Login and go to the Youtube homepage

2. Scroll down and click "Not Interested" on every video you don't want recommended anymore.

3. Keep scrolling until you hit the bottom (there _is_ a bottom, it just takes a while to get there)

4. Scroll back to the top of the home page and click reload.

5. Repeat steps 2 and 3 one more time. You'll notice that the frequency of minecraft video recommendations goes down, but some are still getting through.

After your second run through, you should be good for ~6-9 months. At this point it's much easier to keep up with. Maybe once a year I start to see political videos creep up again but I just click not interested on 4-5 of them and they disappear again. This whole process only took about 10 minutes. Highly recommended if you're getting sick of the algorithm guessing wrong.

Hopefully this helps!

If it is a minecraft channel just click "do not recommend channel". There aren't that many popular minecraft channels, you quickly get rid of all of them.

If it is a mixed gaming channel where you want to watch some things but not the minecraft content it is harder for it to adapt, just have to block the videeos. But in most cases you should be able to block entire channels without blocking things you want to watch.

Edit: Also note that you can still find those videos if you search for them, this only prevents videos from those creators from showing up in your recommendations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com